8CIOReview | | FEBRUARY 2023IN MY OPINIONBy Chris Purcell, Vice President and Chief Information Officer, PEMCO Mutual InsuranceDATA VISUALIZATION HELPS P&C INSURERS PREDICT RISKS WITHOUT TAKING RISKS As the Pacific Northwest's largest locally based personal lines insurer, PEMCO Mutual Insurance has differentiated itself for more than 70 years on our ability to know and understand our policyholders. We're fortunate to live and work alongside our customers, weathering the same storms and sharing an appreciation for the region we all call home. As a property and casualty insurance provider, much of our business revolves around collecting and analyzing data to help us better understand, predict and mitigate risk. Cataloging volumes of data helps us realize patterns and share insights across the enterprise, which guides us in making informed business decisions. However, in insurance, it can be easy to overlook the fact that every data input represents a very real and human aspect of our policyholders' lives ­ purchasing a new home, getting into a fender bender, or coming home to a flooded basement. At PEMCO, we are constantly exploring ways to bring our vast collections of data off the spreadsheet and back to life as a reflection of our customer-centric culture, and as a strategy to mitigate risk for the benefit of the business and our policyholders. By utilizing existing and emerging data visualization tools, we're able to see patterns in the data that help us experiment in a virtual environment. With data visualization, insurers can manipulate and test ideas without suffering real-world consequences. In other words, we can take risks without taking risks. Three tangible examples come to mind when thinking about the ways data visualization helps insurers mitigate risk. First, this concept is particularly relevant as we address the increasing intensity and severity of catastrophic events, like wildfire. In recent years, our ability to visualize and understand the relative risk of wildfires has increased significantly. Using dynamic geospatial mapping data, we can make real-time decisions that help underwriters assess wildfire risk for a specific property and consider the overall concentration of risk in a particular area. Geospatial mapping data works intuitively, Chris Purcell
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